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Randall Zepeda
1,979 Points2013 theme child forced
ok so basically treehouse shows you how to convert and edit the 2013 child theme only and for those of us who don't like it we're out of luck. The one click child theme plugin doesn't let you fully customize what you want and its hard to download a theme you like and figure out how to get the parent theme uploaded to my sftp cyber duck . Im now compromising to make my website with the 2013 child theme because I need to get my content out there to start learning how to monetize it as I don't like wasting time. Would It be possible to later on change my theme and somehow learn the process later on without losing all of my content (100s of articles) ? or would I have to start from scratch again? what do you suggest? Zac Gordon
2 Answers
Sean May
9,145 PointsThis isn't just teaching you how to use the 2013 theme, not by a long shot, this is showing you how to edit CSS inside any wordpress theme and using the 2013 theme as an example.
A child theme is just a safe copy of an existing theme, essentially giving the theme a unique ID so that when the editors/creators of the original theme change something (which happens a lot), you don't lose all your custom styling and functionality. By not making a child theme, the next time the person in charge of the theme pushes a new copy of style.css to the theme, all your customizations are gone.
Beyond that, I think you're maybe frustrated that he isn't teaching you how to edit every theme out there, and really that's a matter of knowing how to use CSS and the inspector to find the proper classes and IDs of the various parts of the theme. I would suggest taking some of the CSS classes on here to get a better grasp on that stuff.
Rachelle Soller
4,107 PointsYou will not lose any of your content if you switch to a different theme. If you don't want to mess around with using a child theme, I would just find a theme that you like out of the box and that you're happy with customizing just in the admin panel. Also, when/if you go back to exploring child themes, do not use the @import method used in this tutorial. This is outdated and not standard. The correct way to create a child theme can be found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
Adina Ciobanescu
4,693 PointsRachelle Soller Thank you for mentioning about @import and providing the link!